Ping After Death - Could be Removed

I like being able to ping teammates (helpfully) after dying. I also like being able to receive pings from dead teammates who are trying to help. I'd prefer not to lose this feature... Many setoners and others share that stance; there is substantial opposition to removing this feature.

Furthermore, if the purpose of removing dead players' ability to ping is supposed to prevent cheating, it doesn't even accomplish that if people can easily still communicate to teammates through text or voice chat.

I liked the fact you could ping after death. It meant you could still help your team even after you were dead. You could look for ACUs and watch for enemy positions. It made watching the game so much more enjoyable after you had died.

If there is no other way to fix this, then I guess that it has to be done

We must absolutely keep pings after death.

If it really is such a problem can't we simply not kill dead players? If ACU is killed then either kill (share until death) or give away (full share) all units and make it impossible to receive units.

Now dead player is not an observer but still dead.

I think this situation is pretty bad:

1. Now even more people know that you can cheat this way (I didn't). Now that it is publicly available, it's safe to assume that everyone will abuse it (or try to).

2. This just takes away a feature without even fixing the bug/exploit. If this can't be fixed, there MUST be a workaround, going as far as kicking out dead players if it comes to it.

To be clear, I am not saying that making this exploit known was a mistake, but a real solution must be found, not something that will take away a feature that many enjoyed while doing nothing to prevent anyone that wants to cheat from doing it.

I’m going to make a larger statement on this when I have time to digest responses, reactions.

Let me add one thing to the mix which has driven my interest: how to handle observers during competitive team game tournaments that are casted live with observers enabled.

During FAF events where games are broadcast, you have to leave observers enabled so that the casters can watch the game from the beginning. That’s fine as they will obviously not be cheating, but what about players who die and join them? They can clearly use this exploit.

As stated by arma already and myself to the devs, most people will be in a voice chat, can message each other through the client, so where is the fix in this case?

I’m in current thinking it’s a small bandaid on a problem rooted to the game, which we can not alter as we don’t have the source code. You cannot take away console commands with the FAF modification…

So here is my plan going forward:

1. Continues listening to feedback in this thread and take it into account.

2. Determine if there’s a way to enable “tournament mode” where pings are disabled to discourage cheating during live casting.

3. Assume that players will acknowledge hosting games with observers enabled runs the risk of cheating being possible. We all have shown that the intended use to assist teammates exist, and gives merit to keeping the feature.

Please let me know if anyone needs to get an explanation in regards to anything I stated here, and again, please know I have no official stance quite yet. These are my thoughts in process. We have discovered that Supreme Scoreboard Modification alters the behavior, so more research is needed. @Sheikah and I discovered this during evaluation.

@valki You are a genius. Sounds like a great workaround to me.

Let's screw 99% of games for this, not a good idea

Come up with a different fix

@morax Tournament mode would be a nice addition in many ways. But I already see half of the tournament games hosted in standard, cause people are unaware/ asleep/ lazy.

Please don’t take away ability for pings. I am rarely in voice chat nor do I want to be and pings make noise and don’t have a language barrier unlike chat.

After reading the comments and discussing with people in private I think it seems quite clear that you can still “cheat” outside of the game using client chat or voice. Since this solution will remove what is supposed to be s a helpful feature, I’m inclined to say this update should be rejected.

Anyone else have a say in the matter?

I sincerely think disabling pings & markers for dead players should not be done. There are so many other avenues to cheat in terms of what the change is trying to "fix" if observers are on, not to mention by having observers on in the first place you knowingly open that box anyway and risk players leaking information about the game.

To be honest this change feels quite absurd to me and I'm amazed it even progressed so far that it is live in fafdevelop now. The pros for the change are almost negligible, meanwhile removing pinging and helping your teammates once dead is a core feature of the game supcom players and the community have used every day for years and years now.

I want to re-iterate again that the exploit isn't necessarily pinging itself, it is being able to ping in the name of someone else.

Keyser and I already discussed reverting it and we're trying to find an alternative approach to achieve the results (not being able to ping in the name of someone else).

I’d be satisfied with the option to just blanket remove all markers and pings from the game (on your own screen) or even better an option to selectively mute those from certain players same as you can mute their text chat. If we can agree that a dude can be SO annoying that muting his in game chat is warranted, how does that not extend to chat markers of copy pasted quran quotes or lenny faces?

(Also they are annoying and provide 0 benefit except to irritate the shit out of you by pinging stuff you noticed 4 minutes ago)

@ftxcommando said in Ping After Death - Could be Removed:

I’d be satisfied with the option to just blanket remove all markers and pings from the game (on your own screen) or even better an option to selectively mute those from certain players same as you can mute their text chat. If we can agree that a dude can be SO annoying that muting his in game chat is warranted, how does that not extend to chat markers of copy pasted quran quotes or lenny faces?

(Also they are annoying and provide 0 benefit except to irritate the shit out of you by pinging stuff you noticed 4 minutes ago)

That is not always true. I have had people ping events I was unaware of and stopped a possible game-ending attack…

Yes, it can be abused and annoying, and if that happens then report the player? It may not be an exact rule break but I’m certain moderation would not be anything other than willing to ask someone to kindly be considerate of the two individuals involved cannot resolve matters on their own.

That’s great, I haven’t had a useful ping in 2000 games and I would light 5000 incense candles in the monastery of St. Lazarus for the dev that lets me mute them on my own screen. People that want them can go ahead and deal with the pain of having them on.

The “then report the player” logic falls off because the same applies to people spamming game chat with quran verses and lennies. If one was such a problem there is really no reason to say the other isn’t.

Guess I should clarify: pings are great when used by players that do something like mark an smd with time it was built if you’re going for some nuke game plan or say something in chat like “enemy chicken 40%” and if you dunno where it is they ping it for you. This is stuff that helps in bigger games like if you’re carrying a 1v4 sentons or playing a 20x20 2v2 game and need to coordinate.

However what it really gets used for is 18 pings on 3 strat bombers when your air is already moving to intercept or 28 pings on a 5k enemy ACU when no one has anything to help or do anything to snipe the ACU. Even better if it’s a big teamgame so everyone is aware the enemy ACU is 5k because there is literally nothing happening anywhere else on the map.

Like 98% of FAF can’t ping responsibly so I’m fine with just a blanket ban that I can change myself, but best solution is just allowing you to personally mute dudes on your end.

yeah,i totally agree,some ui that removes pings would be a must have,as most of the time is just annoying and not helping at all,especially on fullshare lobbies where you are in control of most stuff and someone spams pings and keeps you distracted

@FtXCommando @Rezy-Noob I made a mod that can remove chat and pings but not map markers. I got bored and abandoned the project. I think the difficulty I ran into is that map markers get saved in a data structure because the game has to keep track of them (whereas it can forget about pings as soon as it sends them) so hiding them would be more complicated and I never figured out how to safely disable them.

I didn't want to set up errors, e.g. I didn't know if it would cause a problem that one player is allowed to add extra map markers because he's hiding half the map markers so on his system it looks like there's room for more markers but on other players' systems they show there are too many markers.

For me personally, I use a mod that actually makes in-game chat more noticeable by making a little beep sound when someone types a chat message. (In the mod vault as "ChatBeepLite.") So I just didn't have the motivation to keep working on a silencer mod.

It shouldn't be too difficult to update the mod to include either a blacklist or a whitelist for removing pings/chat from some people but not others.

And I don't think it would be difficult to set it to allow pings from active players but disable pings from dead players (or to be even more fancy, let's say it allows pings from all live players unless they're on a blacklist and it disables pings from all dead players unless they are on a whitelist).

The mod that I abandoned made small changes to chat.lua and ping.lua. You can get rid of chat messages by overriding "ReceiveChatFromSender" with a new function that applies logic to decide whether to show the message or not. And you can get rid of pings by overriding "DisplayPing" with the same thing, apply a little logic to decide whether to show the ping or not.

See also this PR: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3418

You can not ping when:

• You are an observer (army = -1).
• You are in a replay.
• Your focus army is not allied to your original army.

In all other situations you can ping as usual. And the best part: you will always ping in your own name unless malicious intent is in play (e.g., someone changing code).

I am not sure if I can add in filtering options (I want to see no ping of X, but other players can) as they are actual entities and therefore affect the hash made to check for desyncs. @arma473 can I see that mod of yours?

What is possible is:

• Add an option in the game options for pings to (not) make a sound when it spawns from certain people, or in general.

Just blocking pings themselves already makes teamgames way more enjoyable. I don’t really think chat is a problem, if a dude is annoying you can already mute them and chat is where most pertinent info should go when playing anyway.

Since there's already an option to mute someone in chat, how hard would it be to check against that list when a ping comes in, and use that to decide whether to show the ping?